Well…I Didn't See That Coming

Shitmotherfuckerfuck. Not, of course, that such profanity was screamed or whimpered, although I was surprised to hear myself whimpering having never heard such a thing before. Yet this is the kind of language I imagined my vagina would use if it could speak. My uterus and its sick heaving, me vomiting over the side of the bed as I approached transition, my asshole puckering and then failing to hold in the shit as I pushed it and my son out at three-thirty in the morning during a particularly cold March morning in Connecticut. Fuck. Motherfucker. Shit. Because birth is just as profane as it is profound. 

I suppose there are the occasional women out there who have the kind of birthing experiences to be envied. Something more like poofing feathery angels from their twats while they scrunch up their motherly faces all slick with a comely sheen of sweat, and then those babies turn into children that flit about and charm the world with their glitter glue and spangled soccer trophies. That’s okay. I don’t need to wish them into the cornfield anymore. After all, we’re made to forget the pain, to abstract it so that we don’t even have the words to describe the way our bodies are mangled. 

But if I had to describe it, I would tell the whole story. That, for example, the birthing suite and it’s tastefully muted walls, beyond a certain point, were details lost in the rage of childbirth. That the Joni Mitchell I had playing— the candy of her voice— could not be heard over my retching and keening. In fact, all of the ways that I thought I had prepared myself were as effective as closing a slider door on the tsunami crushing towards me. 

Oh, but once I couldn’t handle listening to myself whimper anymore, I called it and asked for the epidural. And the anesthesiologist swept in like a goddess in institutional blue. I sat on the end of the bed and leaned over as still and trembling as I could manage between throes, and the thick, blissful needle slipped deep into my back while I hugged the ball of my as-yet unborn son. Then…numbness. Complete, dead, utter numbness. Because she thought I should get some sleep, the epidural was proceeded by a spinal block, and my legs, the whole bottom half of me, were as rubber as bread dough. 

Thus, it seems the telling should end there. That this is the point where what was should overlay quite nicely on top of what should have been. Epidural. Bam. Birth. But— the word should, it only serves to fuel regret, self-doubt, and worthless obligations. It reminds us that although one’s cervix shouldn’t be torn during childbirth, sometimes it happens. When one commences with the process of pressing a human through a hole that begins as little more than a dimple, one should plan to expect anything. So should can be useful after all.

That, for example, my son’s heart decelerated, the machines binging and my husband going to fetch the nurse. That the nurses and doctor rocked my dead legs back and forth to dislodge my son from the birth canal. That I had to push him out before full dilation so that not only did he tear the opening of my vagina, but he rent my cervix. That he came out as pointy as a pinhead. That the doctor was stitching for so long and the blood loss was so significant, my mother almost passed out. That I would be up for more than thirty-six hours. That I would look pale and bloated in post-partum pictures. That my son, fresh from the womb, slick and a little bit purple, would look me in the face as I floated above the experience. That the minute he latched on to my breast, I became his blubbering fool. That even after all this upheaval and hurt, I would have liked to do it again. That by the time it was possible, I couldn’t.

So consider this a public service announcement, reader. Anticipate the unanticipated. The more you know about not knowing, the better prepared you'll be to be unprepared.

Shoulda. Woulda. Coulda.

Queer as a Three Guinea Bill

…the vast majority of birds and beasts have been killed by you, not by us…

—Virginia Woolf

Forgive me for being so contemplative and reticent about responding to your conservative rhetoric. Here you have dangled the so-called welfare queen in front of me and asked how we can continue to provide safety nets to the less fortunate when clearly your stereotype serves to remind me that any person “on the dole” as you like to say is just a shyster gaming the system. And this is just the tip of your ideological iceberg. I have come to understand that you do not understand why gay couples should marry, why we should put environmental protections in place, why we should reconsider gun-control laws, why we should regulate corporations, why we should invest in education, why we should offer health care reform, why we should tend to — dare I say it? — women’s issues and, in general, why we should do anything that is beneficial to anyone besides what I would call the privileged class of conservatives living in their glass houses.

            Forgive me for not responding sooner. For we, in many ways, share similar experiences here in the present that are far removed from what germinated our political beliefs. I read stories to my son before bed, and so do you, or so I imagine. We equally shake our heads in confusion and dismay when presented with a Miley Cyrus video. You eat wings with blue cheese dressing; I eat wings with blue cheese dressing. Moreover, we all claim to be thinkers, to be interested in how we can make our country a better place. But… those three dots mark a precipice, a gulf so deeply cut between us that…I have been sitting on my side…wondering whether it is any use to speak… Because, frankly, I think all of your conservative sputtering is just a politically and pseudo-religiously convenient way to validate your intolerance for anyone who isn’t white. Yeah. I’m being pejorative about that word, meaning anyone who is different, whether skin tone or otherwise, from your narrowly defined concept of what constitutes “American.”

You see, I was raised by a woman who, though young, thought she was making good decisions about love and her future, and instead found herself a single mother. Then it happened again. She met a man who, though he liked to cut loose, seemed ready to settle down into family life. Boy, was she wrong! Then my mother became a single mother of three children, all because she thought she could change a man. But I know what you must be thinking. She was clearly to blame. And her three children? The ones who, for part of the time, had to rely on government assistance for basic needs such as food? Well, according to your agenda, if a mother has somehow fucked up, so then, too, should her children pay for her poor (only in retrospect) decisions. So, too, should they be fucked by inheritance or otherwise.

Thus you claim to be Christians, but in reality, you’re just Darwinists in disguise. You say I love Jesus but then espouse a magical up-by-your-bootstraps mentality, which has worked for .001 percent of the public who were, as a matter of birth, born at rockbottom. You’re really all about survival of the fittest, but can’t admit as much, so you like to trot out the one black guy you know who beat the odds. Then you say, if he did it, so can you, but you fail to scrutinize his story, fail to recognize that he was the lucky one, the one who had a grandmother who pulled for him, who had a publicly-funded community center that kept him out of trouble, who had a clever mind and an against-all-odds imperative to not just survive, but to thrive. Who was part of the middle class. Spare me the pandering. Spare me the black republicans, the gay republicans, and the Phyllis Shlaflys. They are only representative of rare and narrow truths. 

Furthermore, you claim that you have gay friends, but if they were really your friends and not just people you shared cake with for office birthdays, you would recognize the love they have for their partners as just the same as you have for your wife (I’m pegging you as male. As white male.). If you took any environmental considerations to heart you might recognize that if you don’t do something about fossil fuel consumption now, then that son of yours, the one you like to read to, might be pretty cold in the future when he has to, by necessity, ration oil during the bitterest winters. And if we don’t come up with thoughtful gun regulations, that son of yours might be in the wrong school at the wrong time with the wrong, armed classmate. And if we leave corporations to themselves, we might forget that even if moral people function within the office parks and skyscrapers, a corporation is, by its nature, an unwieldy machine built to churn out profits. And if we fail to invest in an educational infrastructure, then any child not born into privilege must first figure out what bootstraps are because he or she never heard of them, doesn’t know where to find them, and has never been instructed on how to install and use your stupid, fucking bootstraps. And, and, and… I am reminded of the Elvis Costello song, “Tramp the Dirt Down.” Do you know it? It’s written to Margaret Thatcher, one of your people, and the last verse goes like this: Well I hope you live long now/ I pray the Lord your soul to keep/ I think I'll be going/ before we fold our arms and start to weep/ I never thought for a moment/ that human life could be so cheap/ But when they finally put you in the ground/ they'll stand there laughing and tramp the dirt down.

So I guess I’ll just end this here.